Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner, writing in Slate last June:
Justice Scalia is famously outspoken. Is that a good thing for a Supreme Court justice to be? Good or bad, it seems correlated with an increasing tendency of justices to engage in celebrity-type extrajudicial activities, such as presiding at mock trials of fictional and historical figures (was Hamlet temporarily insane when he killed Polonius? Should George Custer be posthumously court-martialed for blowing the Battle of the Little Big Horn?). My own view, expressed much better by professor Lawrence Douglas of Amherst, is that such activities give a mistaken impression of what trials are good for.
Judge Posner seven months later:
Athens convicted him.
History acquitted him.
Now you be the judge!The National Hellenic Museum Presents
Thursday, January 31, 2013, at 6 PM
About the Trial
The most significant legal appeal in nearly 2,500 years will take place at the National Hellenic Museum on Thursday, January 31, 2013, at 6:00 PM, when we will retry the biggest freedom-of-speech case of all time.
Judge Richard A. Posner presiding . . .